The primary purpose of this document is
to make the co-existance between Windows and Linux as simple and uncomplex
as possible which means as far as Windows is concerned Linux doesn't
exist. It is now possible to install Linux on a Windows partition as a disk
image with what is known as the loopback filesystem
– RedHat and Mandrake offer this – but it's an extremely bad
idea because of the way Windows handles files. Defragmenting the system will
become a nightmare and Linux itself will crawl and it will ruin both your
Windows and Linux experience. The same applies to the
Umsdos filesystem (though Linux won't crawl) and
it's best to install Linux on a partition of its own. This document makes a
few presumptions but nothing to worry about – just a few.

You are using Windows 9x (95,98) not Me or 2000.

You are familiar with computers ie you know
how to boot the system using the floppy or cdrom drive

You know your way around DOS and Windows

You know what a partition is and want to install Linux on a
partition of its own

You have a large hard disk – upward of
8.4 Gb – which currently holds
Windows and on which you intend to install Linux (even
those who with smaller disks can read on).

With that out of the way we can begin. The first thing to do is to
make space for Linux. Like other Linux wannabes you are likely to be stuck
with a huge single partition with Windows on it. This would be your
C drive. In my case it was hogging
13.5 gigs. You have to make a separate partition
for Linux out of this space (which would then be labelled as
D). You can either use Windows
Fdisk which really is not a good idea as it
would entail losing all your data and making new partitions from scratch,
one for Windows and one for Linux, or you can take the easier and far more
convenient way out and use a free and excellent non-destructive
partitioning utility called Fips. What makes
Fips special is its ability to create a new
partition out of the free space in your C
partition without any loss of data. The latest version of
Fips (2.0) is available at
its homepage http://www.igd.fhg.de/~aschaefe/fips/
and most Linux distributions carry it under the
/dostools or
/dosutils directory in the primary
cd.

We are going to concentrate on using
Fips so if you are going to use Windows
Fdisk – which actually is totally
unnecessary unless you have just bought a new system and even then it's a
better idea to make a single partition with Windows
Fdisk, install Windows on it and then use
Fips to split it for reasons that I'm going to
explain later in this document – or a commercial partition utility
like Partition Magic you are on your
own.